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Dama Gazelle

(Gazella dama)

by Jay Sharp

The dama gazelle – an icon of wild grace and swiftness – faces a precarious
future in its arid range along the southern reaches of the Sahara Desert. If
it plunges into the black hole of extinction, it will become a symbol of the
environmental cost of climate change, human encroachment, military and civil
conflict and, perhaps most of all, overhunting.

Characteristics

The dama – the largest of some 19 species of gazelles found across Africa and
Asia – belongs to the animals known as even-toed “ungulates,” or the hoofed animals
that have an even number of functional toes on each foot.

Size and Weight: Measures about three to three and one-half feet tall at the
shoulder, weighs about 160 pounds.

Colors: White head; chestnut brown neck, shoulders and back; white belly,
legs, rump and tail; white throat patch; chestnut brown stripe on front of forelegs.
Chestnut brown colors far more dominant on the populations of the western parts
of the range than on those of the eastern parts. Colors vary with age and season.

Range and Diet

The Dama Gazelle ranges across north-central Africa, from the southern Sahara
Desert southward over the Sahel Belt into savannahs. It moves into the Sahara
during the rainy season, from summer into fall, when the region typically receives
a few inches of precipitation. It migrates southward through the Sahel Belt –
a sprawling, generally flat desert-to-grasslands transition zone – as the dry
season takes hold. It spends the dry season in African savannahs, or grasslands
with scattered stands of shrubs and trees. It migrates back northward with the
return of the rainy season.

A grazer and a browser of the daylight hours, the Dama feeds on the grasses,
the succulents, and the acacia and other trees and shrubs, often standing on
its hind legs to reach the higher foliage. Well adapted to its dry habitat, it
takes much of the moisture it requires from the tissues of the plants it eats.

Behavior and Life Cycle

As late as the first half of the 20th century, the
Dama Gazelle – once the most numerous and widely distributed of the Saharan gazelles
– migrated, north and south, in herds of hundreds. Reaching its seasonal ranges,
it typically ran with a herd of ten to fifteen other Damas, including a dominant
(and usually older and stronger) adult male and several adult females with young.

The male reaches sexual maturity at about one and one half to two years of age,
and the female, at nine to twelve months of age.

During the breeding season, from fall into early winter, the male becomes
territorial, asserting his dominance over several females. He signals his claim,
not only with the typical dung and urine, but also with secretions from glands
beneath his eyes. The female calves, delivering a single offspring (or, rarely,
twin offspring) from six to six and a half months after breeding, often just
as grazing and browsing begins to improve with the season. She sequesters her
newborn for a few days, until it finds its legs and can follow her even in flight.
She nurses her fawn for perhaps six months, until it can forage on its own.

Often,
a Dama Gazelle lives for 10 to 12 years in the wild and for several years longer
in captivity.

Perils

Across its range, the Dama Gazelle has served as natural meals for lions,
cheetahs, leopards, hyenas, the African wild hunting dogs and other predators,
but its wild population has dwindled most significantly and most alarmingly at
the hands of man. “The best available information,” said authority Michael Kreger,
Fish and Wildlife Service, in the Federal Register, “indicates that the causes
of the decline of these antelopes [the Dama as well as two other species] are
[1] habitat loss through desertification, permanent human settlement, and competition
with domestic livestock and [2] regional military activity and uncontrolled killing.”

Within only a few decades, the wild population of Damas has shrunk from thousands
to no more than several hundred. Its usable range has contracted steadily as
climate change has induced the severe drought and desertification, allowing the
Sahara to expand southward. Its remaining usable range has been degraded through
permanent settlement by once-nomadic peoples who operate new irrigated farms
and pasture large domestic livestock herds. It has lost the protection of governmental
conservation infrastructures in the wake of military and civil conflict and warfare.

Most tragically, it – along with other species – have fallen to wanton killing,
much as the bison of the United States’ Great Plains came to the brink of extinction
before the repeating rifles of hunters and mindless killers of the 19th century.
In the case of the Dama Gazelle (and other species), “...military and government
officials have inflicted the most devastating losses with access to off-road
vehicles and high-caliber weaponry...” said Kreger. “In 2001, an antelope survey
team observed many signs of antelope killing in Chad including abandoned carcasses,
vehicle tracks, spent cartridges, and eyewitness reports.” In some instances,
the animals’ horns became good luck charms for sale in local marketplaces.

Early in the 21st century, the Dama Gazelle has been placed on the International
Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources’ list of critically endangered
species of the world. It is now likely completely extinct in much of its original
range. A very few may survive along the border between Morocco and Mauritania
and in the southern part of Algeria. A limited number still exist in Mali, Niger
and Chad. Several hundred have been raised in captivity in various parts of the
world and may someday produce seed stock for reintroduction into their original
range.

“In all areas surveyed,” said the International Union for Conservation of Nature
and Natural Resources, the Dama Gazelle’s “numbers have been very low and the
size of observed gazelle groups very small [typically one to five individuals]…
Subpopulations probably number around 20 individuals in all cases, are separated
by hundreds of kilometers, and the current wild population is certainly less
than 500 individuals.”

Interesting Facts

The Dama Gazelle extends its feeding envelope by standing on its back legs
to browse and shrub and tree foliage up to six feet above ground level.

The Dama Gazelle, always highly alert, alerts its comrades to the presence
of a predator by “pronking,” or springing up into the air with all four legs
stiffened.

The female Dama Gazelle, like other female desert gazelles, secrets a newly
born fawn, which “lies still, hidden in crevices, behind bushes and small trees
and remains in hiding most of the time” to protect it from predators, according
to Åsa Strandberg, The Gazelle in Ancient Egyptian Art Image and Meaning. The
young leaves the hiding place only when the mother calls, either for suckling
or when the herd moves to new grazing areas.

The desert gazelle (including the Dama and four other species) appears as
a recurrent theme in the art of ancient Egypt, where its image appeared on rock
surfaces, temple and tomb walls, wooden panels, wands, ceramics over a period
of at least four millennia. In at least some instances, the gazelle may have,
said Strandberg, served as a “representative for the desert mountains as the
setting for death and rebirth.”

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